


永遠のものが無い

by Dorchadas



Category: Scion (Tabletop RPG)
Genre: Backstory, TBD IC Canon, Visitation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-31 07:55:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6462145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorchadas/pseuds/Dorchadas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam Donovan meets his great-grandfather in the most unlikely setting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	永遠のものが無い

Smoke hung faintly in the air in the dimly-lit _izakaya_ , but the place was empty enough and the smokers far enough away that Adam didn’t bother moving. Just a couple, here after a night of karaoke or bar-crawling or time at a love hotel, sitting in the far corner and shutting out the rest of the world.

Not that there was much world for them to shut out. Other than the couple, there were two salarymen who had missed the last train and were getting increasingly drunk and sleepy, and Adam at the bar. He had outlasted the post-karaoke rush, the _nijikai_ s, and the _sanjikai_ s, and now he sat with a glass of _shōchū_ and relied on the fact that the staff were too polite to say anything to him even though he had managed to make his single drink last for two hours now. Distracting them by periodically ordering another bit of meat had worked.

This wasn’t his usual haunt. Normally he would have been out with the other foreign students, at the Shack or Southern Cross or Molly Malone’s or one of the other bars where the staff could understand English and the drinks had familiar names. Not out of his choice, but he could understand the urge. Spending every day surrounded by the unfamiliar, with every conversation an effort, and it was relaxing to sink into somewhere more like home. But that didn’t mean that he wanted to spend his free time in the gaijin bars, and now that Chrissy and most of his other classmates were off on a trip to Fukuoka that Adam decided to skip, he’d use this chance.

Some chance. A half-drunk glass of _shōchū_ and no one to talk to.

Adam swirled the liquid in his glass as the door chimed, and he looked up from his drink to see who else had joined the party. Another salaryman, slightly thinning hair in front, belly getting a little slack, dark grey suit, white shirt, blue tie, as alike to his brethren as though pressed from a mold. Adam could already imagine his two children in middle school studying for their entrance exams, his wife, who only saw her husband in the early mornings and late evenings, his reasonable apartment in a reasonable area of town, and took another sip of _shōchū_. 

“座っていいかい？” the man asked. 

Adam did his best not to choke as he set the glass down and turned. The salaryman was standing next to him, looking at him with slightly unfocused eyes and resting a hand on the bar. He was smiling, with that wide, disarming smile that Adam had learned to associate with people who were sure that he couldn’t understand what they were saying. He quickly scanned the _izakaya_ , checking that all the empty booths were still empty, and briefly thought of abandoning ship and leaving the rest of his drink behind rather than open himself up to the interrogations of a drunken salaryman who probably just wanted free English practice. Then he realized that the man was between him and the door and Adam hadn’t spoken a word that wasn’t a food order all evening. What was a little conversation?

“あ、はい、どうぞ,” Adam replied, gesturing to the stool with a little surprise at his own behavior. 

The salaryman took the seat and called for a bartender, and when the woman came over he ordered a glass of sake, neat. That was a little peculiar—Adam would have expected Asahi Super Dry or Kirin Ichiban, a taste for which was probably assigned to the salarymen along with their suits—but a man was entitled to a little strangeness in his off hours. The sake came, the man muttered something to himself and took a drink, and Adam prepared himself for the inevitable questions that would come. 

“アメリカ人じゃろう？”  
「You’re an American, right?」

Adam started as his mind and his ears warred with each other. The salaryman was speaking Japanese, of course, and that was definitely what the question had sounded like to his ears. But in his mind, the meaning suddenly appeared without bothering to consult the part of his brain dedicated to language. He stared at the salaryman, but his smile was gone and he was looking at Adam with slightly narrowed eyes. 

“はい、シカゴの出身です,” Adam said. He knew the next question would be where in America he was from, and prepared himself for a question about one of the three things that everyone in Japan seemed to know about Chicago: Obama, _The Untouchables_ , or Fukudome Kōsuke. And Adam had never seen _The Untouchables_ and didn’t watch baseball.

“やっぱりな。おまえ見つけにくかった。”  
「Ah, I knew it. You were hard to find.」

Had he heard that right? “Excuse me?” Adam said in English before he could think to say it in Japanese. It didn’t seem to matter.

「I’ve been looking for you for a while. I figured you’d be in Tōkyō or Kyōto, one of the cities that foreigners always go to. Not Hiroshima. Why did you choose here?」

The Japanese washed over him in a wave more complex than Adam had been expecting, but it didn’t matter. Whatever it was in his mind brought the meaning to the fore without needing to hear the words.

“You’ve been looking for me? Why?”

The salaryman looked down into his sake. 「That’s, ah…」

Adam pushed the stool back from the bar and made to stand up, but the salaryman shook his head and pointed outside. He hadn’t heard it over the conversation, but he could see the streaks of rain down the windows, glittering in the neon glow of the _izakaya_ ’s sign. And he had left his umbrella at home like someone fresh to Japan. Well.

「It’s coming down pretty hard. I just need to talk to you for a few minutes.」

The man was right. Judging by the amount of water on the windows, Adam would get soaked to the skin in moments if he stepped outside, and counting the time to leave the alleyway and head out to Namiki-dōri or Chūō-dōri, look for a taxi, and then walk from the taxi drop off to the dorms, he may as well take a shower in his clothes as leave now. 

“So talk,” Adam said as he pulled himself back up to the bar. “Who are you?”

「Izanagi.」

Adam blinked. “From Persona?”

The salaryman’s brow furrowed. 「What?」 He shook his head. 「No, of course you wouldn’t know, Adam from Chicago. I am He-Who-Invites, who spun the Home Islands from the shining sea on the drops that fell from the Heavenly-Jeweled Spear. He who begot Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, and Susano-O. And your great-grandfather.」

The salaryman’s face was cast into sudden shadow by the blue-white flash of lightning through the windows. At the same moment came a terrific clap of thunder, drowning out all other noise for a moment and rattling the bottles behind the bar. Adam heard one of the bartenders yelp in surprise and found his own hand wet from the sudden death-grip he had enacted on his glass. He let go and massaged his fingers, managing to get out an only-slightly-strangled, “What?”

「You remember the stories you heard that your grandparents would never explain.」

He did. Finn Donovan had gone to Japan during the Meiji Restoration with his wife, answering an advertisement to teach English. He had stayed there for years, coming back in 1898 and moving to New York. Adam had never met his great-grandfather, but he had naturally asked questions when his own interest in Japan started to develop. His grandfather hadn’t answered questions at all before his death, and his parents always got that look that told him they knew more than they were saying.

He remembered his grandfather’s black hair, and the way his skin was always deeply tanned as long as there was a hint of sunlight in the sky. He remembered how he had never gotten lost once in Adam’s memory and had been able to find his way without a map in every city he had visited. He remembered the way his mother had, once, looked at the darkening sky after the latest round of layoffs at his father’s job and muttered something about the weather and his moods. 

Just coincidences. The whole idea was patently ridiculous, but there was something about the salaryman’s manner that convinced Adam not to walk out of the _izakaya_ into the rain. He had been the subject of joking before from old Japanese men, and this wasn’t their idea of a joke. 

「You do remember,」 Izanagi said. 「Another drink?」

“Oh. Uh, whatever you’re drinking.”

Izanagi ordered two more glasses of sake and, when they arrived, raised his glass and muttered something then said, 「To reunions!」 before a half-shouted “乾杯!” and taking a much smaller drink of sake than Adam expected.

“What is that you’re saying?” Adam asked.

「Just a thanks to Inari.」 Izanagi took another drink. 「You didn’t answer my question, though. Why Hiroshima?」

“It’s where my great-grandfather taught.” Adam waved a hand as Izanagi opened his mouth. “You know what I mean.” 

「You were called here. Yes, I do. It was the ichor in your blood, I suppose.」

“Alright, I answered your question.” Adam put the sake down and turned to face Izanagi. He really didn’t want to drink anymore right now. “Why were you looking for me?”

「A man can’t want to meet his great-grandson?」 Adam glared at him. 「You are from Chicago, and you bear my blood. There is an agreement I and my descendants are party to in Chicago, of the binding of those who must not be loosed and should not be named. We thought we had imprisoned them for all time.」 Izanagi took a long drink of sake and looked out the window. 「We were wrong. There is nothing that is eternal.」

For a long moment, Izanagi stared out the window into the rain. Just as Adam was about to say something, Izanagi spoke, 「We caught some of them. Imprisoned them again, though in less-impressive prisons. Ones that require reinforcement. One such prison is in Chicago.」

“You want me to be some kind of cosmic jailer?” Adam asked. “I’m an Urban Studies major. What can I contribute?”

「Not now.」 Izanagi waved a hand with a frown. 「One of my scions is there now. Daniel Kitagawa. But the task can be dangerous, and someday, Fate may call you to step up.」

Adam could hear the capitals in his mind, and the Japanese that Izanagi had used stood out to him as well. Not 運命, the usual word for fate. 天命. The will of Heaven. 

Izanagi downed the rest of his sake in a quick drink. 「I apologize. I have something else I have to do tonight. It was good to meet you, Adam. I’ll call you a cab.」

“What, that’s it?” Adam asked. He wasn’t angry, somewhat to his own surprise, but he certainly wasn’t going to let Izanagi just leave like that. “ ‘Hi, I’m your real great-grandfather and I need you as a sacred prison guard. See you!’ Have you done this to any of my relatives?”

「I didn’t need to. Not until now.」

“Why me?”

Izanagi turned away from the window and faced Adam squarely. Adam looked into Izanagi’s dark eyes—black, he would probably say; dark brown, Adam would say—and saw himself reflected there.

And then, he didn’t. The pupils opened like windows and he saw darkness and a man and a woman stirring the ocean with a spear. He saw them descend to the earth, and the woman die in childbirth and the man kill the child with a sword and mourn beside the woman’s grave. He saw the man descend into the depths of the earth, seeking his wife, and finding her in the underworld before leading her back. He saw the man light a fire so he could see his wife, and he saw- He saw-

Adam staggered backward, raising a hand to his mouth to stifle the shout at what he saw in the god’s eyes. 

Izanagi’s mouth just barely curved into a smile. 「There is nothing that is eternal,」 he said. 

The god gestured to the _izakaya_ ’s door, and Adam, half in a daze, left his drink and walked toward it. The god followed behind him with a half-bow to the bartenders and a nod to the drunken salarymen. When he stepped out into the puddle-covered street, there was a cab already waiting there. 

“広島大学までください,” the god said to the taxi driver as Adam got in. Before he closed the door, he looked at Adam. 「Your ichor is awakened now. There may be some difficulties it causes you. I am sorry.」

The door closed and the taxi pulled away from the curb. When Adam looked back, the rain fell unhindered on the empty street outside the _izakaya_.


End file.
